


Apollo has PTSD

by Keyseeker



Series: ToA analysis [5]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Meta, Written between The Burning Maze and The Tyrant's Tomb, not fanfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:28:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24866080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keyseeker/pseuds/Keyseeker
Summary: Unsurprisingly enough, Apollo shows signs of PTSD from several traumatic past incidents - and with how long he's been around, he has quite a few of them, many of which haunt him even thousands of years after they occurred.
Series: ToA analysis [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1799089
Kudos: 59





	Apollo has PTSD

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Apollo has PTSD](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/636673) by Flightfoot. 



**_PTSD_ **

I think most people know what this looks like. It’s been discussed in popular culture rather a lot in recent years. For those who don’t, [here’s a quick briefing on it.](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nimh.nih.gov%2Fhealth%2Ftopics%2Fpost-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd%2Findex.shtml&t=YzA4ZmEyYWIwMDIzNzM5OWE0Yzc5OTVlNTUwZjBiNGM0MjlmMjY2ZSxMbkJlZWtjZw%3D%3D&b=t%3AqZRR1I04hw7yj8nGhrGbZQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Fflightfoot.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F178320534567%2Fapollo-has-ptsd&m=1) I’m using that guide for my PTSD criteria. 

* * *

**Daphne** : Even after all this time, he still harbors an intense guilt over her fate, has a tendency to start crying when reminded of her, and tries to avoid forests:

_I wanted to say:_ You remind me of someone _. But I didn’t dare open that line of conversation. Only two mortals ever had broken my heart. Even after so many centuries, I couldn’t think of her, couldn’t say her name without falling into despair. (THO 23)_

_As I said earlier, I was generally not a fan of the woods. I tried to convince myself that the trees were not watching me, scowling and whispering among themselves. They were just trees. Even if they had dryad spirits, those dryads couldn’t possibly hold me responsible for what had happened thousands of years ago on a different continent._

Why not? _I asked myself._ You still hold yourself responsible _. (THO 43)_

_A woman whispered in my ear. This time I knew the voice well. It had never stopped haunting me._ You did this to me. Come. Chase me again.

_Fear rolled through my stomach._

_I imagined the branches turning to arms; the leaves undulated like green hands._

_Daphne, I thought._

_Even after so many centuries, the guilt was overwhelming. I could not look at a tree without thinking of her. Forests made me nervous. The life force of each tree seemed to bear down on me with righteous hatred, accusing me of so many crimes….I wanted to fall to my knees. I wanted to beg forgiveness. But this was not the time._

_I couldn’t allow the woods to confuse me again. I would not let anyone else fall into its trap. (THO 83)_

Apollo can’t stop remembering what happened to her, checking off the “Re-experiencing” box. He shows avoidance symptoms: he tries to avoid things that remind him of her (which is pretty difficult, considering that “trees” are on that list, and he happens to love the outdoors). He doesn’t seem to have the arousal and reactivity symptoms all that badly, unless feeling tense while around reminders of the event counts. He definitely has the cognition and mood symptoms though, since he has those intense feelings of guilt and negative thoughts about himself, which he admitted in his failure song:

_I sang of my failures, my eternal heartbreak and loneliness. I was the worst of the gods, the most guilt-ridden and unfocused. I couldn’t commit myself to one lover. I couldn’t even choose what to be the god of. I kept shifting from one skill to another—distracted and dissatisfied._

_My golden life was a sham. My coolness was pretense. My heart was a lump of petrified wood. (145)_

Of course, Daphne isn’t the only cause of his PTSD: not by a long shot.

* * *

 **Hyacinthus** : While Apollo doesn’t seem to have quite as many PTSD symptoms in regard to Hyacinthus’s fate - his guilt over his death doesn’t appear to be quite as intense for starters, since Zephyros can reasonably be blamed for most of it - he still exhibits some of the symptoms. He feels intense sorrow over Hyacinthus’s fate, and has a tendency to break down when reminded of his death:

_I opened my eyes and saw a ghost—his face just as precious to me as Daphne’s. I knew his copper skin, his kind smile, the dark curls of his hair, and those eyes as purple as senatorial robes._

_“Hyacinthus,” I sobbed. “I’m so sorry…”_

_He turned his face toward the sunlight, revealing the ugly dent above his left ear where the discus had struck him. My own wounded face throbbed in sympathy._

_“Seek the caverns,” he said. “Near the springs of blue. Oh, Apollo…your sanity will be taken away, but do not…”_

_His image faded and began to retreat. I rose from my sickbed. I rushed after him and grabbed his shoulders. “Do not what? Please don’t leave me again!”_

_[…]_

_****How cruel to see them—the flowers that I had created to honor my fallen love, with their plumes stained red like his blood or hued violet like his eyes. They bloomed so cheerfully in the window, reminding me of the joy I had lost. (141)._

Later, in Burning Maze, Apollo loses his temper in his grief over being reminded of Hyacinthus by Herophile’s crossword puzzle:

_First the maze forced me to read Walt Whitman. Now it taunted me with my own past. To mention my dead love, to reduce him to a bit of Oracle trivia… No. This was too much._

_I sat down on the rim of the fountain and cupped my face in my hands._

_[…]_

_I surged to my feet, my sadness converting to anger. My friends edged away. I supposed I must have looked like a crazy man, and that’s indeed how I felt._

_[…]_

_“Enough is enough! HYACINTH!” I yelled into the corridors. “The answer is HYACINTH! Are you happy?” (TBM 350-351)_

His grief still feels fresh, even after all this time. Mind you, I don’t think what’s shown here alone is enough to say he has PTSD over Hyacinthus’s death in particular, but it just compounds the symptoms of PTSD he already had from other events.

That’s _still_ not the end of PTSD symptoms Apollo has accrued over his lovers’ fates. Can’t forget about Commodus.

* * *

 **Commodus:** Now, I’m gonna have some trouble categorizing “flashbacks” here. Apollo regularly gets overwhelmed with past memories while in his mortal form, and they frequently don’t appear to be PTSD related, such as his flashback to transforming Emmie and her sister into gods or his memories of Herophile’s past. Still, he’s traumatized by his flashbacks of Commodus in ways that he isn’t for other flashbacks.

When Calypso asks Apollo about combat ostriches, he’s thrown into a flashback of the last time he saw Commodus before he became emperor. He’s distraught after the vision ends:

_Then he left the tent - walking, as the Romans would say, into the mouth of the wolf._

_“Apollo,” Calypso nudged my arm.  
_

_“Don’t go!” I pleaded. Then my past life burned away. (TDP 124)  
_

The vision’s ended at this point, since he’s aware of Calypso again, but mentally, he’s still there, pleading for Commodus to come back - because he knows what will happen to him. But what’s done is done, and no amount of pleading will change the past.

He has a much worse flashback later on, when he remembers murdering Commodus.

_Her words struck me in the gut like one of Artemis’s blunted arrows (and I can assure you, those hurt.)_

_We can take him._

_The name of my old friend, shouted over and over._

_I staggered to my feet, gagging, my tongue trying to dislodge itself from my throat._

_“Whoa, Apollo.” Leo rushed to my side. “You okay?”  
_

_“I-” another dry retch. I staggered toward the nearest bathroom as a vision engulfed me… bringing me back to the day I committed murder.  
_

_[…]_

_But as I stumbled to the bathroom, ready to vomit into a toilet I had cleaned just yesterday, dreadful memories consumed me. I found myself in ancient Rome on a cold winter day when I truly_ did _commit a terrible act. (176-177)_

Other times Apollo’s had flashbacks, he’s collapsed, but he hasn’t felt this much distress. Needing to strangle Commodus affected him BADLY, as he accounts at the end of the flashback:

_Britomartis was wrong. I didn’t fear water. I simply couldn’t look at the surface of any pool without imagining Commodus’s face, stung with betrayal, staring up at me._

_The vision faded. My stomach heaved. I found myself hunched over a different water basin - a toilet in the Waystation._

_I’m not sure how long I knelt there, shivering, retching, wishing I could get rid of my hideous mortal frame as easily as I lost my stomach contents. (TDP 182)_

Honestly, this flashback really comes across as being at least influenced by PTSD, considering his highly negative physical reaction to it, which fulfills the “re-experiencing” criteria.

As for avoidance: well, he tries to avoid still pools of water in order to avoid memories of the murder (kinda sucks how commonplace Apollo’s triggers are).

For arousal and reactivity: Apollo just doesn’t have these symptoms as much. Immediately after being reminded he’s slightly snappish, but I don’t think it’s enough to really qualify.

And finally, for cognition and mood symptoms: well he definitely has some feelings of guilt over this, though guilt over the murder itself isn’t all that distorted since, you know, he DID murder him. But he also feels guilt over the events that led up to Commodus going off the deep end, which aren’t really his fault:

_I sobbed and hugged the commode - the only thing in the universe that wasn’t spinning. Was there anyone I hadn’t betrayed and disappointed? Any relationship I hadn’t destroyed? (TDP 183)_

Negative feelings about oneself: check. Distorted sense of guilt or blame: considering that Apollo didn’t really have a choice in this, him either killing Commodus, or letting someone else do it after he destroyed Rome some more, I’m gonna say check. 

So yeah, at this point Apollo doesn’t really have any faith in himself to even HAVE relationships, though he at least seems to feel a little better after a visit with Jo.

Not all of Apollo’s trauma is related to his dead lovers, though. Who can forget the first source of his trauma, Python!

* * *

 **Python:** So the trauma with Python is more hinted at, than fully explored. I have a feeling we’ll see it more in subsequent books, as Apollo gets closer to taking him down again. At least this trauma doesn’t fill Apollo with guilt, so, small mercy there. Also, his memory loss is actually kinda nice here, since the memory of fighting Python is blurred. Python TERRIFIES Apollo, especially in his vulnerable mortal state. He had nightmares of Python for centuries afterwards, and he has a phobia of scaly reptiles, to the extent that he only barely tolerates Hermes’ Caduceus’ snakes. He hasn’t really had flashbacks to the fight that much, though he DOES remember being trapped in Python’s coils when Meg is ALSO caught in a serpent’s coils:

I knew the strength of such a serpent. I remembered being wrapped in Python’s coils, my divine ribs cracking, my godly ichor being squeezed into my head and threatening to spurt out my ears. (TDP 201)

So I guess that MIGHT count as a flashback? Overall though, his trauma with Python seems to mostly just be “that was a nightmarish and scary fight”, but he won and it doesn’t really seem as emotionally taxing as the other things I’ve listed. At least this one doesn’t cause him any cognitive or mood symptoms.

* * *

Lastly, I want to talk about something I’ve left OFF the list: Zeus’s lightning. As much as it would make sense for him to have PTSD over being zapped by it, he doesn’t really show signs of it. He acknowledges being hit by the bolts and says he hates it, but the most obvious trigger, lightning, doesn’t actually seem to freak him out.

_Still… something was strange about his use of lightning. I could always recognize the power of Zeus in action. I’d been zapped by his bolts often enough. Jamie’s electricity was different - a more humid scent of ozone, a darker red hue to the flashes. (TDP 361-362)_

He certainly notes the similarities to Zeus’s lightning, but he doesn’t seem to have any flashbacks or be scared of it. And in TBM, he doesn’t seem especially freaked out by Jason’s use of lightning, even though it WOULD feel the same. 

_Before he could recover and decapitate her, Jason got overexcited._

_I say that because of the lightning. The sky outside flashed, the curved wall of glass shattered, and tendrils of electricity wrapped around Timbre, frying him into an ash pile._

_Effective, yes, but not the sort of stealth we’d been hoping for. (TBM 251-252)_

Apollo just isn’t all that much more freaked out by lightning than he should be. I’m not ENTIRELY sure why that is - though I do have some speculation - but regardless, he doesn’t seem to have PTSD from this in particular, at least.

* * *

Apollo has a crapton of PTSD, and with TBM’s events, I’m betting it’ll get worse before it gets better. He does a pretty good job of functioning though, even WITH PTSD, and doesn’t tend to take it out on others (not that he can at the moment). I feel bad for Apollo, and hope that he can come to peace with some of these issues - at least somewhat - by the end of the series.


End file.
